Top Analyst: Don’t buy Apple on hope

A customer, right, shows his Apple Inc. iPhone SE after purchasing it at the company's Omotesando store on March 31, 2016 in Tokyo, Japan.

Investors were rewarded handsomely over the last decade for buying any dip in Apple shares on expectations of another blockbuster product around the corner. That's not going to work anymore, according to one of the best Apple analysts on Wall Street.

"While we acknowledge many will likely buy the stock on the 'anticipation trade' into the iPhone 7 launch this year, we see slower smartphone sales, lack of growth at the high end, limited market share penetration in emerging markets, and elongating smartphone refresh cycles as key inhibitors to Apple's growth longer term," Deutsche Bank's Sherri Scribner wrote in a note Wednesday.

The analyst also noted that companies of Apple's size are just too big to trade like a smaller growth stock, something that kept a lid on stocks such as IBM and Cisco in the past.

Scribner has a 10 percent one-year average return on her stock picks, according to TipRanks. She is ranked in the top 10 percent of all Wall Street analysts.